Happy Hacking keyboard, Emacs, and meta

Kirk Strauser kirk at strauser.com
Sun Oct 9 14:41:53 PDT 2005


I have an older PS2 Happy Hacking Lite Keyboard (love it!), but I'm getting 
reacquainted with Emacs and one aspect of the keyboard is driving me nuts: I 
can't seem to get the diamond keys (like "Windows keys") to send only Meta to 
Emacs.

I use KDE on FreeBSD 6.0-BETA5 and have it set to run "setxkbmap -option 
-option altwin:meta_win" at login.  If I run "xev" and press those keys, I 
see events like:

KeyPress event, serial 29, synthetic NO, window 0x4000001,
    root 0x9e, subw 0x0, time 110894777, (1067,874), root:(1071,907),
    state 0x0, keycode 115 (keysym 0xffe7, Meta_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

  ... and ...

KeyPress event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x4000001,
    root 0x9e, subw 0x0, time 110914901, (651,795), root:(655,828),
    state 0x0, keycode 116 (keysym 0xffe8, Meta_R), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
    XFilterEvent returns: False

However, if I run Emacs and type C-h k (describe-key) and then M-a, for 
example, I get the error message "H-M-s-a is undefined" as though the 
keyboard is sending Hyper-Meta-shift(?)-a instead.

I'd like to get this fixed ASAP, as using ESC for Meta for the rest of my life 
doesn't seem too appealing.
-- 
Kirk Strauser
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